Using an Ecological and Biological Framing for an Anti-racist Covid-19 Approach

  1. Araceli Camargo
  2. Elahi Hossain
  3. Sarah Aliko
  4. Daniel Akinola-Odusola
  5. Josh Artus
  6. Ilan Kelman

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Abstract

In the United States and the United Kingdom COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people respectively. Multiple studies identify environmental factors such as overcrowded housing and poor workplace conditions as contributing factors for the disproportionate COVID-19 rates amongst BAME and BIPOC communities. This paper will show that to fully understand the phenomenon, both an ecological and biological approach is needed. An ecological approach highlights how a person’s habitat and the experiences within it mediate their susceptibility to disease. Moreover, to understand how this mediation works, this paper will use allostatic load as a biological pathway to link a person to their habitat and the poor health outcomes that contributed to COVID-19 susceptibility. In introducing this new approach, the paper will serve as an anti-racist framework for understanding how COVID-19 affected BAME and BIPOC communities. It is anti-racist by centring poor health outcomes on the habitats people are forced to live in due to structural racism rather than the physiology of a person’s race or ethnicity. This is important in order to avoid similar crises in the future and to improve the health of marginalised communities.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.24.21250397: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.01.24.21250397v1 on medRxiv